Creation in the Crossfire

The Ukrainian Museum, New York, ignites the rediscovery of Janet Sobel’s work during World War II.

INTERVIEW BY CHRIS BYRNE

An exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum in New York acknowledges Janet Sobel’s contribution to drip painting before Jackson Pollock during the Second World War. However, Janet Sobel: Wartime e mphasizes her most prominent period as an artist in the ’40s through 48 drawings and works on board.

Chris Byrne discusses the Ukrainian American artist’s concerns about the safety of her family and her period of prolific creation and acclaim with the museum director and exhibition curator Peter Doroshenko (formerly of Dallas Contemporary).

Chris Byrne (CB): Janet Sobel: Wartime is extraordinary, and it’s the first museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s early work—how did the show come about?

Peter Doroshenko (PD): I first saw Janet Sobel’s work during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art’s library after I moved from Kyiv, Ukraine, back to the United States. I was surprised that she was Ukrainian American and a key artist during the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York. Yet it was hard to see actual works by Sobel outside of the Outsider Art Fair in New York, or in major museums across the country. I slowly gathered information along the way and after moving to New York last year and beginning my new post as the director of The Ukrainian Museum, I started to organize a solo exhibition of her work. The exhibition focuses on her early work before and after World War II and makes certain parallels to the current war in Ukraine.

CB: As noted in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, very little has been written or documented about Sobel’s life and work over the past 70 years.

PD: Sadly, there is very little written material about Sobel during her lifetime. Organizing the exhibition catalogue for Rodovid Press was both a challenge and learning experience for art historian Aliza Lozhkina, who wrote a significant text, and for my conceptualizing forward. Much of what we know about Sobel is oral history that her son, Sol Sobel, passed along to a few people over the years. She also did not speak or write much about her art making, which is a bit astonishing. She had exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s at major galleries in New York, yet no significant catalogues or publications.

CB: In 1945, Sobel’s paintings were included in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century’s group show The Women; the following year, the gallery hosted a solo exhibition of her work.

PD: Yes, Janet Sobel was a major art world figure during the 1940s and 1950s. She knew Peggy Guggenheim, artist Max Ernst, and writer André Breton, along with philosopher John Dewey, and gallerist Sidney Janis. Sobel became well networked in New York with some of the most visible and active avant-garde members.

CB: Her paintings were also included in the 9th Street Art Exhibition in 1951, the debut of Abstract Expressionism in America...

PD: It is documented that Sobel attended the exhibition opening with her son, Sol. She was only one of five women artists in the first and seminal 9th Street Art Exhibition Other artists included Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, and Lee Krasner. The exhibition contained works by Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Davis Smith, Milton Resnick, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman among others.

CB: To date, curators and institutions seem to have focused on different aspects of her work—in 2005, art historian Gail Levin published the essay “Janet Sobel: Primitivist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist.”

PD: Most critics and art world afficionados focus on Sobel’s later Abstract Expressionist works and how Jackson Pollock appropriated her drip painting style for his own. Much has been written on this topic over the last two years. Yet Sobel started as a self-taught primitivist artist and later morphed to a more surrealist way of working. Her drip paintings came last.

CB: Yes—and as well as the drip technique associated with Pollock’s mature work, Sobel has also been rightly credited with pioneering all-over painting...

PD: She always pushed and morphed her work during the 1940s. In 1947, Sobel began to drip paint onto paper, board, and canvas. At times the final works were very dense with paint; later the competed works became lighter in paint application and color choices.

CB: Following The Ukrainian Museum’s survey, the Menil will open Janet Sobel: All-Over in February 2024.

PD: Natalie Dupêcher, the associate curator of modern art, is organizing an exhibition of later works by Sobel. Natalie recently visited the Sobel exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum in New York, and the upcoming Menil exhibition sounds like an important project. I look forward to visiting Houston to see the exhibition. P